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Posts tagged: label converting

Heidelberg and Canon/Ocè both reemphasized their push into the digital packaging printing market at their customer events last week. Each company gave a detailed update on the progress it has made.

As promised back in April at a digital sneak peek event, Heidelberg showed their first digital label printer at the Gallus “Innovation Days” from the 23rd to 25 of September in St Gallen, Switzerland. The event, which is not to be confused with the Hunkeler innovationdays) served well as a platform to reemphasize the changes in the ownership structure; this summer Gallus became part of the Heidelberger group, the upshot of a share swap that increased Heidelberg’s ownership of Gallus from 30% to 100% and with the former owner of Gallus becoming the biggest individual shareholder in Heidelberg.

Center stage, however, was the digital label press with the somewhat less catchy name of Gallus DCS 340. The press, which comes with in-line finishing, is the result of development cooperation between Gallus, Heidelberg and Fujifilm. The press base is supplied by Gallus and is derived from the well-established ECS 340 label press, hence the web width is set at 340 mm (13.4”) and a range of flexo, screen and offset modules can be added. The press has a solid granite base and is equipped with an unwind and a die cutting/stripping module. Only the speed of the DCS had be limited to 50 m/min (150 ft/min) compared to 165 m/min (492 ft/min) of the conventional press. The integrated finishing is somewhat misleadingly named “ digital converting system”, since the ECS C finishing part contains no digital components at all. Its core is a semi-rotary die cutter, which is at least format variable, but still requires a conventional die.

Digital package printing is poised for big growth as advances in digital printing technology can now feed heightened demand for shorter runs of packages and labels from consumer goods manufacturers. At the same time, while many printing markets are losing share to the Internet, packaging is a market that can’t be digitized. Package printers, converters, and commercial printers can all benefit by expanding into this market.

According to our 2010 Market Assessment: Color Digital Printing in Packaging and Label Converting, InfoTrends projects that digital package printing will grow 15.7% annually, rising from $1.8 billion in 2009 to over $3.7 billion in 2014. Packaging represents the single biggest analog-to-digital print opportunity in the graphic communications market.